I have a file, basically it's a small text file which has been created and modified on one Linux system and copied on to my machine. I would like to know how can I retrive the time stamps of the file for the events that happened in the former OS. is it possible to trace the old time stamps on my machine or should I have access to the first machine, in both cases which tools can I use. I tried 'stat', 'ls' which doesn't provide much details.

“Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough: we must do.” - Bruce Lee

don't know if it'll do what you want, but look in to -ctime, -atime, and -mtime. if you didn't use an archive option to preserve the meta data, when you copied it over, the data may not be there on the new machine.

Unless you specifically used a copy utility that preserved the MAC times of the file, you can't trust the file was copied with metadata preserved. You are also not sure if it is the same file unless you have cryptographic hashes of both, the source and the destination, to support this.

Your best bet is to analyze the original file, or rather a forensically sound copy, of it. (You don't to work with the original evidence as a rule of thumb.) As others have already stated, there are a ton of utilities that will give you the metadata of the file. You may also want to look at autopsy and sluethkit (http://www.sleuthkit.org/autopsy/).